Studio Crits

Weekly studio crit sessions: demo your work-in-progress prototype and get feedback from peers and tutors.

Each week you build a prototype in response to a provocation, demo it to your crit group at a live URL, and give and take feedback. The studio crit model walks through how a session runs and the thinking behind it, and each week’s standout prototypes land in the hall of fame.

Each crit carries two numbers, and the briefs below show both: its label (C1–C10, numbered by its own sequence) and its teaching week. A crit runs the week after its number, so C1 is the week 2 crit.

Weeks 4, 7 and 9–11 don’t run to that shape. When a week runs differently covers what replaces it, and each brief below says how its own session runs.

The briefs are deliberately playful, and they get spicier as the semester runs. This isn’t a startup course, so making things that don’t make commercial sense is often the point, and the best provocations are sly. The line that holds throughout is to satirise, expose or stress-test a thing without shipping real harm at real users.

Crits run weekly from week 2 to week 11 in crit groups of around 20, each session 90 minutes, in the Marie Reay Building (155), Room 4.03. (Your group also meets in week 12, which is working time for finalising the final project plus an optional redeemable crit for anyone carrying a crit mark of 1 or below.)

There’s no crit in week 1, but there’s already a deadline in view: your C1 prototype freezes at the cutoff before your week 2 session. Use the first week to get your environment set up and ship a first deploy — the teaching team is watching Ed from day one if you get stuck.

Sign up for a crit group through MyTimetable as soon as your enrolment comes through, and before the start of week 2 — groups open for signup progressively as enrolments settle, so check back if yours isn’t listed yet. Every group has its own crit agent, named for a Chinese painter, and the group is generally called by its agent’s name: you’re in Shítāo, or you’re in Báishí.

Each group’s session, tutor and weekly cutoff (the moment your prototype freezes, two hours before the session — see how the crits are marked):

The group list is provisional until enrolments settle: groups may be added or dropped, but sessions and cutoffs won’t move once you’ve signed up.